‘The name is Elder, not Elgar’

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  Petroc Trelawny

  ‘The name is Elder, not Elgar’

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

Elder’s first concert-going experiences were at Hornsey Town Hall in north London, but he is very aware of the Hallé’s role in Manchester life. The orchestra’s good and bad times seem to coincide with the ups and downs of the city. ‘We’ve got our first skyscraper now,’ he laughs, ‘and another on the way. More seriously, though, the people who run Manchester are well aware of what it was a century ago, one of Europe’s richest cities. They want to recapture something of that character and aspiration, and part of that is having two immensely talented symphony orchestras [the BBC Philharmonic is the other] as well as two immensely talented football teams.’

Talking about Manchester gives Elder the chance to discuss one of his great heroes, the orchestra’s founder, Charles Hallé. ‘He added the acute accent to the the ‘e’ in a desperate attempt to get people to pronounce it properly,’ says Elder. ‘He even had a period of spelling it Halley. Here was a German pianist, who’d lost all his pupils in Paris thanks to the Revolution, and was then lured to northern England by the German

textile community who wanted an orchestra. He was an exceptional personality and I feel part of the tradition he

established.’

Elder started conducting at Cambridge, before taking a job at Australian Opera where he oversaw more than 150 performances in just two years. His career took off as music director of English National Opera in the 1980s, part of the fabled Elder–Jonas–Pountney ‘powerhouse’ triumvirate. Now his former assistant conductor in Manchester, Edward Gardner, has taken over the troubled company, and Elder is crossing his fingers that better days lie ahead. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see ENO confident again. It needs to be able to survive when a cast doesn’t quite work, or a production isn’t what everybody hoped. It needs to find conviction so it can ride over the blips. Heaven knows we had some shockers when I was there. I managed to be away for The Making of the Representative of Planet 8 but I didn’t avoid Princess Ida. Nobody remembers the blips back then, and they talk now in glowing terms of “our time”.’

Does he defend the company’s decision to stage the musical Kismet? Yes. ‘Years and years ago the orchestra learnt Götterdämmerung in the morning under Reggie Goodall before coming back to do Kiss Me Kate at night. It makes a lot of sense. After all, the Coliseum was designed as a vaudeville theatre.’ And if his protégé felt like inviting him back? Elder smiles. ‘I wish ENO well and I would love it if in the future I could do something with them.’

This leads us to Elder’s own operatic ambitions. It’s been suggested he was ‘disappointed’ not to get the job of music director at Covent Garden last time around. He diplomatically refrains from discussing the Royal Opera, where he works frequently, and then affirms his commitment to the Hallé. ‘But,’ he goes on, ‘if there were an opportunity to lead a company again, it would be something that would mean a lot to me. I’ve spent many hours inside opera houses around the world, I’ve got a huge repertoire, and the business of production style and singers is second nature to me. But it will either happen or it won’t. I’m a great believer that our lives evolve as part of some much bigger energy, so there is no point having regrets.’

Elder will spend his birthday weekend conducting Elgar in Manchester — the cello concerto, the 2nd symphony and the rarely performed oratorio The Kingdom. ‘I remember my mother on the telephone when I was a child patiently explaining, “No, no, no, the name is Elder, not Elgar.” The moustache has always fascinated me. Such a barrier. This image of an Edwardian success story with fantastic nose and huge, bristling moustache. He was a vain man, socially inept, tactless, and yet he was such an important figure in the musical development of our country. I just want to do right by him and bring his work to more and more people. And the fact that we share a birthday; well, that seems to me to be another part of the “grand design”, the vast scheme that controls all our destinies.’